Books

I picked this up at my local bookstore completely by chance. I didn’t know Doctorow had a new book out, and I like his non-fiction generally, so I bought it on the spot. It turned out to be a signed copy, which was a nice bonus. The title is worth explaining. A centaur, in the usual telling, is a person made more capable by a machine. A reverse centaur is the arrangement flipped around. The machine does the work, and the person is bolted onto it to handle the parts it can’t, at the machine’s pace and on the machine’s terms. ...

Daemon came out in 2006. Daniel Suarez originally self-published it under the name Leinad Zeraus, which is his own name spelled backwards, and Goodreads still files it that way. That is how I found out, and it is a good indication of how long this book has been quietly circulating. The premise is that a famous computer game designer dies, and the software he left behind reads his obituary online and starts acting on it. From there it spreads outward into the economy and eventually into how society organises itself. It is a thriller first, and a good one, but Suarez is clearly more interested in the second-order effects than in the chase scenes. ...

I enjoy most of what Dave Eggers writes, so I was always going to read this one. It still surprised me. It feels more mature and more grounded than his other books, and I say that as someone who liked the other books. It follows two people who love art, their stories winding around each other from their teenage years all the way into old age. Along the way it makes some genuinely interesting observations about the art world, about what it actually means to be a “successful” artist, and about how people who are real artists look at things differently from the rest of us. ...

This one sat on my reading list for years and I finally got to it. The internet goes away. Not degraded, not censored, gone, and the book moves back and forth between the years before that happens and the years after, mostly around an anarchist enclave in Bristol. I enjoyed it, with reservations. The first reservation is that it’s more post-apocalyptic than I usually go for. The second is that the premise is far-fetched, and I don’t really believe it could happen the way it happens here. ...

I’ve already used this book as a counter-example in my note on The MANIAC, so it’s only fair to give it its own entry. The first part is genuinely good. Mallaby is very strong on Demis Hassabis’s early years, the gaming background, the chess, and later the Go and the board games. Hassabis is a genuinely interesting person and obviously extremely intelligent, and the account of how he assembled his interests into a research programme is worth reading. ...